Jim Shooter: Yes, of a heart attack but uh…at the point when he died he was still doing a regular series for us, THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF INDIANA JONES and quite a lot of other work besides. I know that Gene, like many other guys, was doing some work on the outside for independent, smaller publishers and like that.

Gene Day's death was the first time I learned of the demise of a comic book creator, and I felt his loss keenly then--I was 11 years old in 1982--as his work on Master of Kung Fu and an issue of Star Wars (#68) had such beautiful detail. No one drew cathedrals and graveyards like Gene Day. He also used a storytelling technique that employed all the panels on a page to follow a single page of action. There's a fight sequence in Master of Kung Fu #115 where this is realized to perfection.